Name Anthony Summers Role Author | Education University of Oxford Movies Norma Jean & Marilyn | |
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Awards CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction Books Goddess: The Secret Lives of, Not in your lifetime, Official And Confidential ‑ The Sec, The Eleventh Day: The, The Arrogance of Power Similar People Robbyn Swan, Tom Mangold, Stephen Dorril, Ashley Judd, Tim Fywell | ||
Anthony summers the eleventh day
Anthony Bruce Summers (born 21 December 1942) is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of eight best-selling non-fiction books.
Contents
- Anthony summers the eleventh day
- 9 11 pentagon debate craig ranke cit vs anthony summers
- Career
- Major writings
- Conspiracy
- Official and Confidential The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover
- The Eleventh Day The Ultimate Account of 911
- Looking For Madeleine
- Other works
- Television work
- Awards
- References
9 11 pentagon debate craig ranke cit vs anthony summers
Career
Summers is an Irish citizen, and has been working for more than twenty years with Robbyn Swan, who is his co-author and fourth wife. After studying modern languages at Oxford University, his early work took him from labouring jobs to freelance reporting to London newspapers, to Granada TV's World in Action – the UK's first tabloid public affairs programme, to writing the news for the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, then back to England to the BBC's 24 Hours, a pioneering late evening show that brought viewers coverage from all over the world. Summers became the BBC's youngest producer at 24, travelling worldwide and sending filmed reports from the conflicts in Vietnam and the Middle East, and across Latin America. A main focus, though, was on the momentous events of the 1960s and '70s in the United States – with on-the-spot reports on Martin Luther King's assassination and on Robert F. Kennedy's bid for the presidency. He smuggled cameras into the then Soviet Union to obtain the only TV interview with dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov – when he was under house arrest, having just won the Nobel Prize. Before moving on from the BBC, Summers became an Assistant Editor of the prestigious weekly programme Panorama. Long based in Ireland, he has since the mid-'70s concentrated on investigative non-fiction, usually taking from four to five years to produce a book – conducting in-depth research, combining digging in the documentary record with exhaustive interviewing.
Major writings
Summers has written about historical figures including Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, President John F. Kennedy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Richard Nixon. He also wrote biographies of celebrities Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra.
Conspiracy
Summers' 1980 book Conspiracy was updated in 2013 as Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the JFK Assassination. In the latest version, he implicated Cuban exile Herminio Diaz, an employee of Santo Trafficante, as a grassy knoll shooter in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The book won the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction in 1980. Toby Harnden of The Telegraph called it "well done" described Summers approach as "dismissing the more fevered theories while casting doubt on the Warren Commission". Journalist Burton Hersh described Conspiracy as "bedrock to the [Kennedy conspiracy] literature".
Official and Confidential, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
In a review for The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that Official and Confidential, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Summers' 1993 biography of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, "sets a new standard of what might gently be called revisionism."
The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11
In 2011, Summers and Swan's The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 was published to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11. According to Harnden, the authors "principal criticisms are that the Bush administration was asleep at the switch on 9/11; that vital intelligence was ignored; that the FBI and CIA did not share information; and that Saudi Arabia was intimately connected to al-Qaeda and is sometimes overindulged by the US."
The Eleventh Day was a Finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History and was also awarded the CWA's Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction in 2012.
Harnden said that there was "no real evidence" for Summers and Swan's claims that the CIA negotiated with Osama bin Laden prior to those attacks or their attempt to recruit two of the hijackers as agents. While criticizing the authors for a lack of original research, failure to interview major figures within the Bush administration, and "habit of posing portentous questions without answering", he noted that their depiction of the "horrors inside the World Trade Center" and bravery of the Flight 93 passengers was "well written and moving".
Looking For Madeleine
In 2014, Summers and Swan published Looking For Madeleine, an account of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.in 2007.
Other works
Other works by Summers include:
Television work
In addition to the coverage listed above, Anthony Summers sent reports on subjects as varied as:
Awards
Anthony Summers was made a Fellow of the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin in 2012.